About Me

http://worldconnect.rootsweb.com/cgi-bin/igm.cgi?db=shawcross
Tom Shawcross was born in St. Louis, MO and now resides in Delray Beach, FL. He is the father of a daughter and a son. His hobbies are writing, travel, and genealogy research. Before his 1995 disk surgery, he liked to run and play tennis. He has never gutted an elk.

Carmen Miranda

Before I started writing daily blog stories, I used to e-mail a series of daily quizzes to my friends. In the spirit of nostalgia on this Thanksgiving Day, I offer a special edition of:

Today’s Quiz

· Who was the highest-paid entertainer in the US in 1943?· Who was the highest-paid female in the US in 1945? ($210,000)· Who inspired the advertising icon “Chiquita Banana”?

The Chiquita Banana advertising jingle:

"Hello Amigo...I'm Chiquita Banana and I've come to say/You eat the banana in a special way/And when it's fleck with brown and has a golden hue/That's when bananas are the best for you...."

The Chiquita Banana jingle was created in 1944 for the United Fruit Company by a BBDO advertising team headed by Robert Foreman. The song's lyrics, written by Garth Montgomery and music composed by co-worker Ken MacKenzie, instructed Americans on how to ripen and properly use this golden tropical fruit, for example, putting them in pies, or salads and to never to put the equator grown fruit in the refrigerator.

source: http://www.tvacres.com/admascots_misschiquita.htm

The Answer to Today’s Quiz:

If you said “Carmen Miranda,” give yourself a gold star!

I have fond memories of Carmen Miranda, who passed away on 5 Aug 1955 (five years to the day later, Marilyn Monroe, another of my boyhood favorites, would die). For some reason, I have a particularly vivid memory of the Carmen Miranda coloring book that I saw in the Kresge’s dime store at Hampton Village in 1954 (or maybe it was a Woolworth’s 5¢ and 10¢ store, my memory of the store name is not quite so vivid). For the benefit of my younger readers, there used to be 5¢ and 10¢ stores, sometimes called “five and dime” and later on “dime stores,” in which one could actually buy products that cost five or ten cents. Of course, they carried higher-ticket items as well, such as the Carmen Miranda coloring book I coveted, which was a “too much money” 15¢.

In my opinion, this would have been a great coloring book to buy, because it offered so many options for the colour artiste. Carmen Miranda was famous for wearing the multi-colored dresses and tutti-frutti hats of Brazil’s Baiana region, so one could use any color in the Crayola box when coloring a Carmen Miranda color book, as opposed to say, a Batman color book, which dictated a limited palette, dominated by blacks and greys.

I recall studying this page of the Carmen Miranda color book, and thinking about which colors I might use:

Born in Portugal on 9 Feb 1909, Maria do Carmo Miranda Da Cunha came to Brazil at the age of one year. At the age of fourteen, she had to drop out of school to help earn money for the medications needed by her sister, who had developed tuberculosis. Her first job was making ties, but then got a job at a boutique called La Femme Chic, where she learned how to make hats. She was so good at this, she started her own hat-making business, and her brother Mario quit his job to help Carmen deliver hats to her customers. But this success was just the first for Carmen. By age 17, she was performing at parties and small motion pictures. At age 19, she recorded her first song, Samba Não vá Simbora.

The famous Brazilian composer and doctor Joubert de Carvalho was inspired by hearing her sing, and he wrote Tai for her, which sold 35,000 copies, a record for its time (later the popular Brazilian soft drink Guarana Tai was named after this hit song). By 1935, Carmen was a big star in Brazil. She was making movies with her sister Aurora and had lucrative radio and recording contracts.

In February of 1939, the figure skating champion Sonja Henie and theatrical producer Lee Shunert came to Rio de Janeiro and saw Carmen perform in the baiana costume she had worn in her movie Banana de Terra. Sonja invited Carmen to perform on Broadway.

American audiences loved her. In no time, she became a headliner and a style setter. In New York City alone, Saks sold millions of dollars of Carmen Miranda jewelry and accessories. In 1940, Twentieth Century Fox asked her to star in the movie Down Argentine Way.

Ironically, this movie was banned in Argentina and criticized in Brazil. Why? Well, some say it depicted the people of Argentina in a foolish way. I have not seen this movie, but I do wonder if they may have over-reacted. Carmen Miranda was an entertainer, not an actress in documentary films.

Having said that, it is indisputable that Carmen’s powerful personality, style, and sensuality became bigger-than-life in subsequent movies, which lampooned her heavy accent, mangled English, and sex appeal.

Excess

Some people say that Carmen became a caricature of the Latina woman, that her image was carried to excess. Excess? Where did that come from? Just to make sure, I looked up the definition of Excess in Webster’s online dictionary: Main Entry: 1 ex·cess Pronunciation: ik-'ses, 'ek-"Function: nounEtymology: Middle English, from Middle French or Late Latin; Middle French exces, from Late Latin excessus, from Latin, departure, projection, from excedere to exceed1 a : the state or an instance of surpassing usual, proper, or specified limits : SUPERFLUITY b : the amount or degree by which one thing or quantity exceeds another 2 : Carmen Miranda, as depicted in any of the Busby-Berkeley-directed movies, but particularly so in 1943’s hit movie The Gang’s All Here.

One of the classic scenes in The Gang’s All Here was a song and dance number called “The Lady in the Tutti Frutti Hat.” In this scene, set on a lush tropic island decorated with sixty scantily-clad native girls, Carmen Miranda appears in a gold cart drawn by gold oxen. She was supposed to wear a thirty-foot tall headdress of fruit and banana flowers, but this simple yet tasteful headdress was dislodged when the camera boom carrying the Director Busby Berkeley swooped in too close, allegedly causing the distraught Carmen to cry out “Eef you wan’ to kill me, why don’ use a gun?” So, the thirty-foot headdress was replaced by a larger, painted one that reached to the ceiling of the sound stage:

Excessive? You make the call.

Ok, maybe some would call that excessive. Or maybe this scene with giant dancing bananas:

Personally, if any of the scenes in that movie were excessive, I would say it was possibly the scene in which Carmen played a giant banana xylophone, or maybe the scene with the giant strawberries in the later, colorized version (they were way too red).

It is interesting to see how Carmen Miranda has been viewed over time. At the height of her popularity in the US as a singer, dancer, comedienne, and movie star, she was resented in Brazil as a sell-out, a woman who provided a false image of Latina women and had become too Americanized. Now, however, time has mellowed that image, and she is remembered as a musical innovator, one of the first true samba superstars, and the most famous Brazilian entertainer (even though she was of Portuguese birth, she was known as “the Brazilian Bombshell”). As for presenting a false image of Latina women, I have discussed this with my friend Jorge Camargo, who has been in every country in South America (I have been in only four), and he agrees with me that all Latina women are not as beautiful and exciting as Carmen Miranda. In truth, only about 85% of Latina women are gorgeous. But that’s movies for you – always exaggerating – Latina women do not in fact walk around in seven-inch platform shoes and towering headdresses, as Carmen did in her movies.

Sadly, Carmen Miranda died young. As noted in Wikipedia:

Carmen Miranda, who neither drank nor smoked, died of a heart attack less than a day after an appearance on The Jimmy Durante Show. On an A&E Biography episode about her, there was a fairly startling piece of tape or kinescope footage from that show, from August 4. After a dance number, she nearly passed out, presumably suffering a mild precursor to her later, fatal cardiac arrest. Durante, standing next to her, caught her and helped keep her on her feet. She then smiled and waved to the crowd, and walked offstage, unknowingly for the last time. She was gone by the next morning.

After her death, it was discovered that Carmen had died from untreated toxemia and heart failure stemming from pregnancy.

1 Comments:

I have always been a fan of Carmen Miranda, love her movies...don't know if excess is the right word for her movies or the movies of that time, I would say "over the top extravagant" but fun indeed to watch...I love any movie before the 50's... I have TCM on everyday.